I would realy suggest to have a unstable branch. It's a big waste of time for the everyday-user to figure out what is important to upgrade or not.
Most of us wont spend hours a day for upgrading and runing etc-update.

I would suggest to have a variable like
STATUS="STABLE"
STATUS="UNSTABLE"
STATUS="BROKEN"
STATUS="SYSTEM"

in every .ebuild file or something like that. If I perform a emerge -s foo, and there is a stable AND an unstable version, both are shown, possible in different colors...

After I decide to want foo unstable I have to request it via
emerge --unstable foo

I think this will safe us a lot of everyday trouble, also it makes packages.mask redundant. Storing such information in a centralized area isn't that good idea._________________--
Felix Kurth

An unstable branch would be excellent. I have told Gentoo do to an emerge -u world overnight and come back the next day to find out that X is broken, that it suddenly installed Gnome because of a dependency change, etc. This sucks. (BTW, on a more recent note, XFree 4.2.0-r9 refuses to work -- which is auto-upgraded.)

Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2002 5:46 am Post subject: Not only an unstable branch, but how about a stable branch?

I'd like to see a solid stable branch also, something that is highly tested and could be put on a production server... I'd like to have a completely optimized from scratch linux distro on a server, but currently I can't trust Gentoo, because things are likely to be broken at any given moment...

I couldn't agree more about having seperate branches, there should ba a stable branch: this branch would only change for security and bigfixes, there should be a contrib branch where non-developer submitted ebuilds reside (use at your own risk) , and there should be an unstable branch where all development work is being done for the next release of gentoo.

I would use gentoo on our network if I could trust that packages weren't changing and breaking without any sort of distribution level version control.

I like the idea of having ebuilds for whatever my heart desires and to live on the cutting edge. However, this is my production box. I would like it to be stable, and I would like the ability to have the current stable version of a prog, rather than whatever just got patched in the CVS. The one thing that slightly annoyed me about the install was the fact that Gentoo took the stable 2.4.18 kernel and patched it with the 2.4.19-pre1 patch. I didn't want a pre-kernel. Also, I'm wanting KOffice. However, I cannot simply emerge the stable 1.1.1 version of KOffice that is fully KDE 3 compatible. There is the latest beta of 1.2 for download and compile. I don't want KOffice beta, but so far, I have not seen a work around to get the 1.1.1 version I see when browsing Gentoo's CVS. Anyway, I think these situation taken together with the others here warrant seperate stable, devlopment, and contrib Gentoo trees. Thank you for all of the hard work you have done, though.